Ultra Running for Beginners: What It’s Like to Run a 52-Mile Mountain Race

I’m covered in mud. Wet, sticky, mud. And blood, and salt from sweat and tears. But I’m still moving. Hobbling like I’m headed to breakfast in a nursing home, but moving, nonetheless. 

The wind blows dirt in my face and the sun beats down on my head. My knee hurts so bad I can’t even slow jog, and stepping down sends lightning bolts of pain through my leg. I keep thinking about the 8,000 feet of elevation I still must drop down. 

I’m closing in on the second of only two places where someone can easily drop out and remove themselves from the Bighorn Trail Run, a 52-mile race on rocky, muddy, dusty, snowy and wet trails in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. 

And I’m thinking about quitting. 

In a few miles, I will see my husband and daughter. They will have our truck, and I can slip away. Of the 200 people who lined up this morning to start the race, about a third will drop or be pulled. 

But I don’t want to quit. No one does. 

I’ve trained for this ultra mountain race for months, running in blizzards, rain, and 50 mph winds in the Wyoming prairie near my home. I woke early on Saturday mornings to turkey hunt then skipped out on fishing to run 20 miles. I need to stay in the race to justify all those sacrifices.

But then there’s also the possibility that I’m ruining my knee. That the pop I felt behind my kneecap weeks earlier wasn’t just a tight hamstring but a blown meniscus. 

Even then, I’m not sure if I will be madder at myself for dropping out of a race I’ve committed to running or forcing myself to finish a race knowing the rest of the summer’s backpacking trips will be off the table. 

And with that calculation, I realized what it meant to run, hike, and hobble 52 miles in a day, something I thought, as a relative newbie to ultrarunning (but not to suffering), I could do. 

Now I’m not so sure. 

“I Hallucinated My Ass Off”

To much of the world, ultra races — those longer than the classic marathon distance of 26.2 miles — seem pointless at best and stupid at worst. They’re sufferfests. Opportunities to thrash knees, ankles, and feet, not to mention gastrointestinal systems. 

The race I am in is notoriously muddy and rocky. It starts at almost 9,000 feet and over the course of 52 miles goes up nearly 8,000 feet and down more than 12,000. Its rugged trails offer even more opportunity for fatigued legs to trip on rocks and roots, sending the runner tumbling down the trail like I did at mile 17. 

But for some reason ultra races are only becoming more popular. This includes the 32-mile, 50-mile, 100-mile races, and the even newer phenomenon of 200- to 250-mile races. 

Times for these events vary wildly depending on the runner, terrain, and conditions. For example, the Bighorn 52-mile winner finished in just over eight hours. All the rest of us have 15 hours to get it done. Miss any cutoffs, which are carefully calculated to make sure people can finish in the allotted time, and you’ll be pulled from the race. 100-mile races can be spread out into two days, and the 200-mile races take more than three days. It took Pennsylvania-based ultrarunner Eric Quallen 82 hours to do the Tahoe 200. He took only a few 30- to 40-minute cat naps to keep himself at least relatively in touch with reality. 

Even then, he says, “I hallucinated my ass off.” 

But they were benign hallucinations, he says, like when he thought a pile of rocks was a cooler full of drinks deposited by a trail angel. He never completely lost himself, like one runner in the Moab 240 who thought a tree root was a snake and refused to move, or another racer who was forced by medics to rest because a lack of sleep had made him violent and combative. 

None of my fellow racers, 20 or so miles from the finish, looked like they’re having any fun. The 100-mile racers who finished on the same 52-mile course as us looked like they’d turned from humans into zombies. 

Why, it’s reasonable to ask, do people pay hundreds of dollars to push their bodies to these extremes? 

For Quallen, the answer is simple: “There’s really nothing like figuring out exactly how far you can go, and it’s always farther than you think. There are no other places in my professional or personal life where I can push myself to those limits.”

Suffering in the Wild

There is also some perverse joy to suffering in community (at least when the suffering is chosen and not forced). That’s what I told myself as my sister-in-law and I huddled together in the hazy, 5 a.m. light at the 52-mile start. We both ran the 32-mile version of this race last year, swore we would never do it again, and then registered for the same race only 20 miles longer. 

I signed up for a long combination of reasons. It gave me a goal to train for. Running — spending time outside in general — in early spring in my high plains hometown where the wind routinely blows 50 to 70 mph as it careens over mountains and smashes into the prairie is often as appealing as a root canal. But preventing future suffering is one hell of a motivator, so I load the dogs and go, and at some point even start to enjoy those long training runs. 

Also, like Montana runner Steven Brutger who stood at that same start line in mid-June, I spend most of my days behind a computer. We need something to force us outside on wet spring days.

Brutger grew up active, but when he phased out of being a wilderness guide, he realized he had to become more intentional. So he started running. At first, he ran too fast, too far, too soon. He hurt himself, then recovered, then ran again. He ran farther, then a little farther, then one of his friends asked him to race up a mountain. Registration just required showing up, and everyone got a beer at the end. 

“It was steep enough that nobody was running, and it counts as trail running. It kind of reminded me of hiking,” he says. “And I didn’t have to carry a big backpack or an elk.”

That’s the interesting reality about ultra running: Few people at distances 50 miles and beyond actually run the whole thing. They run the flats and downs and gradual ups. Anything too steep they walk or power hike, which makes the race more about willpower and endurance than speed and split times. 

Brutger then signed up for longer and longer mountain races. He stayed in the mountains because of the scenery, which is also why my sister-in-law and I were there instead of, say, a marathon through Chicago or New York. Trails wind through mud and snow, sure, but also offer unparalleled views of jagged rock walls and fields deep with purple lupine and bright yellow balsamroot. Trails wander through meadows, forests, past aspen groves and up canyons. 

There is something natural about suffering in the wild. 

“Who in our ancestors would run 50 miles on a road? We were made to move through the natural terrain and something about the ruggedness and the mud, you feel you are doing what you were created to do,” says Lillie Rodgers, a friend and fellow sufferer who won the women’s 52-mile this year. “There’s this huge sense of liberation that comes with going someplace that a vehicle or bike can’t take you and being that far in the backcountry.”

So when the starting official finished playing the national anthem over her cell phone, barely audible above pre-race jitters, we took off with the rest of the pack, running and shuffling our way through deep mud and snow drifts and then starting our way down. 

“She’s Trying to Get My Will” 

The first 17 or so miles have gone great. But the first 17 or so miles weren’t the ones I was worried about. Then I fall, lurching face-first down a steep section of trail and slamming one knee into rock and the other onto hard dirt. A mile later, we stop at an aid station. I change into dry socks, and shove a banana and Pringles into my mouth hoping my stomach won’t reject them. My knee, I pray, will thank me for the respite.

It doesn’t.

My knee is swelling and won’t bend. Even after a 3-mile hill with a couple thousand feet elevation gain and yet more downhill, the pain doesn’t go away. 

Sixteen miles later comes that decision point, to keep going or quit. If I continue, dropping out will be almost impossible until close to the end. No one will rescue me off the trail for a sore knee. 

But dropping out means giving up on myself and admitting I don’t have it in me. 

Up until now I thought I could do hard things. Maybe I need a reminder. 

So I make friends. For miles I talk to a lanky guy in his 60s from a nearby Wyoming town who babies his knees and walks with trekking poles that I desperately wish I had. His wife was in the 32-mile. They do these to stay fit, he says, and because why not. 

For miles I also leapfrogged with Jeff, a 69-year-old who finished the 100-mile last year in 33.5 hours. With about 12 miles left to go we travel at the same pace for a bit, he with a hitched gait, me with my hobble. He says he does races like this because his daughter keeps signing him up. I ask if she also races and he laughs.

“Hell no,” he says. “She’s trying to kill me off to get my will.”

The guy clearly likes running, he does not need a reason for continuing on, and is too stubborn to die. This makes him the perfect comic relief for a particularly hot and steep section. 

I’m not sure I ever fully make the decision to stay in the race. I just never quit moving. One step follows another, and then another…

Done.

I feel relief as my sister-in-law and I walk under the finishing arch to the smell of grilled burgers and hugs from family. Mixed in with the relief is worry about my knee, but also another feeling … something like pride.

I will never, I tell anyone who will listen, do another one of these. Nothing longer than 26.2 miles for me, if my knee recovers long enough to allow me to go even that far. 

But as I write this, after an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon who tells me that aside from beat up cartilage and some fluid, my knees are remarkably fine for a runner of, ahem, my age, I realize I only told people I wouldn’t do that race again. Not that I’d retire from these ultra races in general. 

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Because even after decades of cross-country ski racing, backpacking trips, and marathons, maybe these events, deep in the mountains surrounded by similarly masochistic humans, are what it takes to prove to myself that I can still do hard things. 

Or, as Rodgers tells me over coffee weeks later: “We are all so much more capable than we give ourselves credit.”

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